Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Arizona Marine Shot 60 Times by SWAT - oops

A sheriff's department in Arizona is investigating exactly what happened during a SWAT raid that left a former Marine dead -- shot 60 times.

According to a report in the Arizona Daily Star, 26-year-old Jose Guerena was asleep after working an overnight shift on May 5 when his wife heard noises outside their house at around 9:30am.

She woke him up. He told her to hide in a closet with their four-year-old son, and then he grabbed his AR-15 rifle to see what the trouble was.

Moments later, SWAT officers opened fire in Guerena in his kitchen with 71 bullets, hitting him 60 times, doctors told the family.

Initially the Pima County Sheriff's Department said Guerena fired on officers first, but they have since retracted that. The Department, however, is not releasing details of the raid, and what, if anything, they found in the house.

Three other houses in the area were also served with search warrants that morning as part of the mysterious investigation. The Sheriff's Department has said deputies found drugs and money, but didn't say if any of it came from the Guerena house.

This week the 911 call Guerena's wife made for help was released. According to the Daily Star, half of the ten minute call consisted of Vanessa Guerena pleading for dispatchers to send an ambulance to help her husband.

Operators for the Drexel Heights fire department were trying to figure out if that was one of the houses where the SWAT raid was happening. When they eventually did, the Sheriff's Department told them to hold off on sending an ambulance, other audio records show.

The fire dispatcher asked: "You don't want us going in, right?" The sheriff's operator then said: "I don't know what is going on. You guys go ahead and hold off until we know what it's going to be."